''Veniliornis'' is a
genus
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...
of birds in the woodpecker family
Picidae. They are native to Central and South America.
Taxonomy
The genus was introduced by the French ornithologist
Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1854. The word ''Veniliornis'' combines the name of the Roman deity
Venilia Venilia (pronounced , or as Latin ''Venīlia'') is a Roman deity associated with the winds and the sea. According to Virgil and Ovid, she was a nymph, the sister of Amata and the wife of Janus (or Faunus), with whom she had three children: Turnus, ...
with the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
word ''ornis'' meaning "bird". The
type species
In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...
was designated as the
blood-colored woodpecker (''Veniliornis sanguineus'') by the English zoologist
George Robert Gray
George Robert Gray FRS (8 July 1808 – 6 May 1872) was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother ...
in 1855.
The genus contains the following 14 species:
References
Bird genera
*
Taxa named by Charles Lucien Bonaparte
Higher-level bird taxa restricted to the Neotropics
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot
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